Google joins presidential bribe club [View all]

On Monday, Google paid a $24.5 million bribe to President Trump.

The bag of cash was euphemistically described as a “legal settlement,” but in this dangerous political moment, we do ourselves no favors with polite obfuscation.

Google, like Paramount and Disney, decided that it was better to pay off Donald Trump than beat him in court. As an economic calculation, it makes sense — a few million dollars is a small price to pay to keep sweet with a despot using the levers of government to punish his enemies.

If they can arrest James Comey, they can definitely arrest Google CEO Sundar Pichai. But the rest of us now have to live in a country that is much closer to oligarchy, thanks in large part to the quiescence of the tech bros who fashion themselves as defenders of free speech.

On January 7, 2021, after laying siege to Congress in an attempt to nullify an election, the sitting president was kicked off of every major social media platform.

Six months later, Trump held a press conference at Mar-a-Lago to announce that he was suing Twitter and Facebook — whose pronouns are now X and Meta — along with Google’s subsidiary YouTube. For good measure, he also named CEOs Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai as defendants.


https://www.publicnotice.co/p/google-settlement-trump